Every few days, I post musings, ideas, quotes, and mini-essays on writing, painting, and the creative process. I'm a professional freelance editor, pastellist, and novelist. I believe in supporting the creativity of all of us.

Tuesday, June 1, 2010

Practice with writing sentences

As I've mentioned before, many of us write very well indeed with little or no knowledge about how our language is put together. Others of us are curious and want the additional flexibility that real knowledge can bring.

I've been thinking about an exercise that I often do with writing improvement classes I teach. I ask the students to pick one reasonably long sentence from their work (3-4 lines of type) and then write three more versions of the same information. Of course, it's helpful if they know the following information:

English has only four types of sentences although we can generate an infinite number of sentences within those types.